Director of Postgraduate Studies (PGR)

Profile

Professor Yang Zhang received BEng from Zhejiang University, China and PhD in the Engineering Department of Cambridge University. He then worked as a Research Associate and Research Fellow (Darwin College, Cambridge University) on two projects (Integrated Diesel European Action : IDEA and the follow-on project IDEA EFFECT) supported by six European car manufacturers and EU. After this, he moved to UMIST and then the University of Manchester before taking the Chair of Combustion and Energy in Sheffield.

His laboratory specialises in combustion and advanced flow diagnostics. The combustion lab has several lab scale burners for both fundamental research and teaching. An industrial gas turbine combustor (1 MW) is available for testing and research. A high pressure test burner up to 20 bar has been built for combustion studies. The burner has two quartz windows and two pure silicon windows, which are transparent to infrared and longer wavelength (e.g. Terahertz wave).

Besides the conventional diagnostic techniques, the group is known for in-house developed diagnostic techniques, which can be applied not only in flame dynamics studies but also in many fast moving dynamic systems. The team has great strength in signal and image processing capabilities, including multi-channel data acquisition, high speed imaging and stereo imaging.